With over 4000 signals to distribute, transfer and route, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) proved to be this year’s showpiece for Riedel’s TDM based distributed mesh networked system MediorNet. Understanding the intricacies of such an event is key to realizing why TDM is such a powerful solution.
The complexity of modern OTT and VOD distribution has increased massively in recent years. The adoption of internet streaming gives viewers unparalleled freedom to consume their favorite live and pre-recorded media when they want, where they want, and how they want. But these opportunities have also presented content owners with unfortunate challenges, typically piracy and overcoming illegal content copying.
Broadcasters are no longer faced with the binary choice of going down the SDI or IP routes. The hybrid method of using TDM (Time Domain Multiplexing) combines the advantages of distributed networks with IP and SDI to deliver a fully integrated solution that helps broadcasters working across multiple technologies.
The conversion of monochrome TV to color was quite a trick, but it came at a cost.
IP is well known and appreciated for its flexibility, scalability, and resilience. But there are times when the learning curve and installation challenges a complete ST-2110 infrastructure provides are just too great.
We live in fascinating times: increasingly, we live in the era of cloud-based broadcast operations.
Previously a basic record/play system using a hard drive was considered. This relied on a table linking time codes in the recording with physical addresses so that the drive would access audio data blocks in the right sequence slightly ahead of when they were needed. In that way a time base corrector could present the samples in an unbroken sequence at the correct sampling rate to a DAC. The mechanical timescale of a legacy medium such as tape or film has been replaced by a logical timescale.
Building optimized systems that scale to meet peak demand delivers broadcast facilities that are orders of magnitude more efficient than their static predecessors. In part 2 of this series, we investigate how this can be achieved.